Val Meredith

[Employment Insurance, February 12th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, last year the Minister of Human Resources Development was in charge when there was a billion dollar boondoggle, and this year she has to explain why there is a $651 million bungle.

In 1996 the EI program had an error rate of 4% and last year under the minister's leadership the error rate jumped to 6.6%. That amounts to $651 million.

Could the minister explain why under her management the number of mistakes made is growing at such an astonishing rate?

[Employment Insurance, February 9th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it is being used illegally. The government has been aware over its duration that the abuse of EI is occurring and it has done very little to stop it.

As a matter of fact two years ago the Liberal member for Brampton West—Mississauga travelled to British Columbia to accuse the EI investigators of harassing and intimidating farm workers. She actually interfered in the EI investigation that was going on.

Why is the Liberal government allowing the criminal use of EI money, Canadian taxpayer money, to continue?

[Employment Insurance, February 9th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the auditor general has confirmed that for the past two decades the federal government has permitted massive employment insurance fraud by farm workers and their employers in B.C.'s Fraser Valley.

For 20 years, Canadian taxpayers have seen their hard earned tax dollars being illegally pocketed by a small group of criminals. Despite all the resources that the government has, it continues to allow that to occur.

Will the government please explain to Canadians why it continues to allow their hard earned tax dollars to be used illegally?

[Speech From The Throne, February 7th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have the opportunity to share some thoughts with the Chamber. We have decided that the theme of today from the official opposition is regional interests. As a member from British Columbia, I am delighted to bring some of the concerns that British Columbia has with the direction that the government is planning to take and has shown in the throne speech.

I will be addressing the omissions from the throne speech, the things that it did not address. There are a number of concerns that British Columbians have. One of the main concerns is the high level of taxation, both on a personal level and a business level, which prevents us from being competitive with our American partners.

British Columbia's economy is very much a partnership with the United States, as much as it is with Canada, so the high level of taxation that interferes with our relationship is certainly something we are concerned about. The brain drain that is happening, the loss of our medical people to the United States because of taxation reasons, all of these are concerns.

Another area of great concern to us is the low Canadian dollar. It affects each and every one of us, not just people in British Columbia. Part of the reason gas prices are so high is that the gas is bought and sold in American dollars so we automatically are paying half again as much as our American counterparts who are buying it. The low Canadian dollar causes people in my constituency and in British Columbia great concern and we see nothing from the government that indicates it plans to do anything about it.

There is the fact that for whatever reasons, and I will not go into what the reasons might be, we in western Canada and particularly in British Columbia feel that there is no support from the federal government. We have urban transit issues that need to be addressed and we do not seem to be getting any support from the federal government for that kind of program. We have trade issues that are very much a concern, softwood lumber being the most recent, and we do not see a commitment from the federal government to represent the interests of our region in these negotiations.

There is something as simple as the trade centre. When Toronto wanted to redevelop its harbour to make it more aesthetically pleasing and to offer something to the community with their trade and convention centre, the federal government was there to assist them. However, when Vancouver wants to develop a trade and convention centre to improve its harbour, the federal government is not there.

We wonder why there is this inequity? Why is it that a city in the east with the same type of project gets the support and a city in the west does not?

Of all these issues, the one that causes us the gravest concern is the government's lack of respect for the people of British Columbia. It is indicated in many ways. Some of them are very apparent, some are not. That lack of respect also plays out here in that British Columbia is under represented in the House of Commons. Our population deserves a greater representation in the House.

We are concerned that there is a lack of understanding that Canada has changed its dimensions since Confederation in 1867. It is not okay to leave things the way they are. It is not okay to continue to not respect the fact that there has been a massive change in the population in this country. It is not okay to continue to have British Columbia under represented, not only in the House but in the other place.

British Columbia was recognized by the House a number of years ago as a distinct region. Canada now has five distinct regions as recognized by the House of Commons. However, that is not taken any further than a piece of paper in

Hansard

. One of the smaller Atlantic provinces has 10 members in the Senate and British Columbia, the third largest province, has six representatives.

A province which is recognized as a unique and a distinct region, different from the rest of the country, has six members, while Atlantic Canada has thirty-two members, as a distinct region. Ontario has 24 members as a distinct region, as do the province of Quebec and the prairie provinces as distinct regions. There is something wrong when British Columbia, the third largest province, is shown such disregard for its true place in Confederation, our true place in Canada.

There is a lack of respect for the changes that have taken place. The country is different now, some 130 years later, than it was in the beginning. We need to recognize there is a different dimension. We have a very multicultural community on the west coast which is not recognized by government policies. There has to be a willingness for the members of Confederation to sit down and start looking at what is appropriate going into the 21st century.

British Columbians want to see a willingness to accept the fact that British Columbia is the third largest province, that is unique and that it has a lot to offer Canada as far as ideas and participation. There should be more interest shown by the federal government to include British Columbians in what happens in the country. We feel that not only through distance but through attitude there is an unwillingness of the government to recognize the contributions of people in British Columbia.

I hope that its omission in the Speech from the Throne was not deliberate. I hope the Liberal government will be willing over the next for our five years, a mandate given to it by the people of Canada, to show the people of British Columbia that it truly wants our participation, that it truly recognizes our place in Canada and that it will seriously look after the inequities of representation in both the House of Commons and in the Senate.

British Columbians would like to see signs of willingness by the government, not just talk, to recognize and acknowledge British Columbians as equals in Confederation. When that happens we will feel that we are a respected member of Canada.

In the Speech from the Throne that was not apparent and was missing. I hope that efforts will be made by the government in the very near future to show British Columbians that it was an omission, that it was not aware of some of these considerations and concerns and that it is sorry and will do something about it.

I am hoping it was only a big mistake. I hope there will be signs in the future days ahead that British Columbians can feel respected and wanted members of this confederation.

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you on your appointment to the chair.

Bill C-2 was known in the last parliament as Bill C-44 and is known more by its unofficial title of the Liberal Atlantic Canada re-election strategy. The parliamentary secretary has explained some of the details of the bill so I will not go into them. However, I will say that the official opposition does not support the approach the government is taking on these amendments.

We are not alone. There are people and organizations across the nation who feel that this is not the right direction to take: the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, the St. John's Board of Trade on the east coast, the Vancouver Board of Trade on the west coast and probably all the boards of trade in between. Even the Canadian Federation of Labour has problems with the bill.

When the bill was first introduced last fall, this is what Catherine Swift, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, had to say:

After several years of making some steps in the right direction on EI policy, this is a U-turn that hearkens back to the 1970s—a big spending government promoting dependency on programs, instead of solid economic growth. We thought they had learned something from the mistakes of the past.

We also have the International Monetary Fund report. Last week the finance minister was bragging about how the IMF supports Canada's economic incentives and economic and fiscal policies and said that he had received high praise from the IMF. However, he chose to ignore paragraph 8 in the report, which I should like to read into the record. It states:

Comprehensive reforms enacted during the 1990s to the Employment Insurance (EI) system and to social assistance programs and the introduction of the National Child Benefit have enhanced the flexibility and efficiency of the labour market, boosting employment growth and helping to reduce structural unemployment. Pressures to ease the impact of some of these reforms—particularly the 1996 EI reforms—have intensified as they have become more binding. The Government has mitigated the intended effects of some of the reforms and has proposed to rollback others. In particular, the IMF staff sees the proposed elimination of the intensity rule, which was designed to discourage frequent use of the system, as sending the wrong signal. Frequent use of the system, along with the provision of extended EI benefits for high unemployment regions for a prolonged period of time, has had adverse effects on the behaviour of both workers and employers, has significantly raised reservation wages in high unemployment regions, and has reduced labour mobility. In addition, the recent experience in the United States suggests that labour market flexibility is an important factor in fostering the rapid adoption of productivity-enhancing new technologies. Therefore, the IMF staff continues to endorse the implementation of new measures to reduce the frequency of EI use (such as experience rating of the EI premium rate, which would tie the rate for individual firms directly to the use of the system by their workers) and the elimination of regional extended benefits.

This quote is from the International Monetary Fund, which the finance minister seems to think is highly supportive of government policies. This is one area in which it has recommended and suggested to the government that the change in direction is not in the best interests of the economic future of our country.

If IMF support is so important in all other areas and if its recommendations are so valid in all other areas, why does the government turn its back on the recommendations that the IMF put forward on the EI insurance program?

The question is, with this coming from the IMF, why would the government go in this direction which retreats from the very policy that the IMF claims is having a beneficial economic impact on Canada.

We in the official opposition feel that it is extremely important to get the bill before the standing committee on human resources so that the committee can hear witnesses and have an indepth study to look at the EI program and the benefits and lack of incentives that are being proposed.

We would like to put Bill C-2 before the House of Commons and have the government, which said it was in favour of parliamentary reform, let the bill pass through to committee in a very real and meaningful way.

Let us see whether the government will seriously listen to all aspects of the discussion from witnesses who have a lot to say about the legislation. Let us see whether the Liberal government will actually allow committees to do their job, to listen to witnesses and to come up with recommendations to change the legislation and make it more meaningful.

The Canadian Alliance would like to see whether or not the government is willing to look at some of the concerns that have been expressed. One concern that has been expressed is that the legislation is taking the control or responsibility from the EI commission and placing the rate changes in the hands of cabinet.

There is a real concern out there, not only in the Canadian public, among workers and employers alike, but in labour commissions and labour organizations, that the government is trying to control this fund to a degree that we have never seen before. Instead of having the employment insurance program at arm's length from government, the government is reaching in and bringing in total control over the EI program.

One has to ask oneself why this would happen. Why would the government want to have this kind of control? A surplus of $40 billion may be all that is needed to see why a government would want to do this. The EI fund is reaching the point of having a $40 billion surplus. I think the government would like to see this as its personal slush fund to use at will rather than for the purpose it was intended.

The chief actuary for the fund has indicated that a $15 billion surplus is all that is required in the program. I would like to look at last year alone. EI premiums last year were $18.511 billion. That is money coming in. EI benefits paid out were $9.3 billion. That leaves a $9.211 billion surplus in this fund which the cabinet wants to control. I suggest that is the wrong direction for the country to take. It is wrong from the employer point of view and from the employee point of view. It is wrong from every way we look at it for the cabinet of a government to have control over that kind of money, which was put in place for a specific reason.

I am sure the poor working person who is paying employment insurance premiums does not want to continue paying an inflated amount of money so that the government has access to a huge surplus fund to use whenever it wants. When these surpluses were brought to the attention of the government, what did it do? It reduced premiums by 25 cents, a small, piddly amount.

The reality is that every worker could stop paying EI premiums for two years and we would still have the surplus in the account that is required, according to the chief actuary, to have a stable fund. We could go two years without any premium payments and the fund would be where it should be.

We must ask ourselves why the government is so intent on keeping employment insurance premiums to a level that gives it surpluses every year, to the point of building a surplus fund of $40 billion. The reason is so that the government can balance its books. It is balancing its books on every working person and on every business person who provides jobs for working people. That is not fair. It is not right and it has to stop.

In its August 1999 unemployment insurance bulletin, the Canadian Labour Congress states “The UI fund must be separated from the government accounts, and the authority and autonomy of the UI commission must be strengthened”. That needs to be brought before the committee of parliament. It needs to be reasoned out. We need to find a way of strengthening the EI commission, of putting it at arm's length from government and taking control of it away from the Canadian government and cabinet.

This is only a drop in the bucket for the government, which takes things out of the public eye, away from commissions that do business up front, and puts them behind the doors of a cabinet meeting. It puts things beyond the reach of ordinary Canadians to understand or to know what is going on.

It is distressing to me to see that we will be continuing this direction with a government that has told Canadians it will be more transparent and more open. We see that the very first legislation to be introduced in the House of Commons is doing precisely the opposite. The government is taking something that is open and transparent and putting it behind closed cabinet doors.

More than anything else, the thing that distresses a lot of Canadians and me personally is the importance that the government places on making small amendments to the employment insurance legislation rather than looking at creating an environment of long term permanent jobs for Canadians across the country from coast to coast.

Five years ago the Liberals announced changes to EI. The Prime Minister stated “we wish to provide an incentive for people to work instead of receiving social benefits”. We have to wonder why the government is turning away from that challenge.

The Minister of Finance, the Minister of Human Resources Development and the Prime Minister have said that the best way to help unemployed people is to put them to work, to give them jobs, to have jobs created so that they can find employment. I suggest that the government has done little to create any employment. The parliamentary secretary claimed that there were 400,000 jobs created in Quebec and 2.1 million jobs created across the country. I challenge her, in that it was not the federal Liberal government that created those jobs. The small business community and the business community created those jobs.

The Minister for International Trade pointed out last year that 85% of these new jobs were created due to trade. Most of the increased trade is due to the free trade agreement and NAFTA, and let me remind Canadians of elections past when the Liberals opposed the free trade agreement and NAFTA. They violently opposed free trade and NAFTA until they formed the government.

There are some things that the government could do. The first is to substantially reduce personal income tax.

By leaving money in the hands of consumers, the government could have increased the purchasing power of Canadians. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that by increasing the purchasing power of Canadians one increases jobs. There are provinces that have shown that this works. There are provinces that had the courage to do what had to be done and they saw the benefits. The federal government did not have the courage.

If the government really wanted to do something concrete, something that would benefit the economy, it could have developed a vision for a national transportation infrastructure strategy program.

I am amazed that the government has such little insight and foresight and such little incentive to place the country in a position where we can compete in the North American marketplace and compete internationally.

The Liberal government is not even paying lip service to the development of a national transportation strategy. While our economy has grown, we are still relying on a transportation system that was built almost a half a century ago. We think the system should be adequate enough to service our people and our goods. In many places, the movement of people and goods is in total gridlock while the government sits back and does nothing.

The port of Halifax is a very good example of what could have been. Two years ago Halifax was bypassed as this continent's Atlantic super port. Halifax has an excellent port. It is much more convenient to Europe. Why was it bypassed? It was bypassed because there was no adequate infrastructure to move the goods from the port to the North American trade market, to the cities and towns that would be using the materials brought in. There was no adequate railroad access to the market. Why did New York get it instead of Halifax? It was because there was no adequate infrastructure program in place to support the Halifax bid.

Think of the jobs that the transportation infrastructure strategy would have created, not only in Atlantic Canada but in the north, long term jobs that would have benefited the future economy. Where is the strategy, the planning and the insight? The strategy is not there. The vision is not there.

The government wastes money on grants and all kinds of things, but it does not put money where it would have a meaningful impact on the growing economy of our nation. It is not just Atlantic Canada and Quebec, it is also the north. The north has the capacity and the potential of some major developments and megaprojects. The north is an area of traditionally high unemployment and it is waiting for something to happen.

The aboriginal community in the Northwest Territories is prepared to negotiate for the Mackenzie River pipeline. There is also talk of a gas pipeline from Alaska coming down through the Yukon to join the existing pipeline network that currently extends as far as northern Alberta. Alaska is also seeking a rail link from that state to join our northern rail lines that only go as far as Fort Nelson and Dease Lake in northern B.C.

People in the Northwest Territories are also talking about extending the Mackenzie Highway from its current northern terminus at Wrigley all the way to Inuvik. The extension of this highway would assist in opening up the vast untapped mineral reserves of the Northwest Territories.

Let us not forget our new territory, Nunavut, which would like a road link with the rest of Canada. While these projects would undoubtedly cost billions of dollars, they will also return billions of dollars to the federal government coffers through taxes and royalties. Equally important is that they would provide hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of man years of employment, good paying long term employment.

If the Liberals were truly interested in an employment strategy for the country, they would be in extensive negotiations with the territories, the western provinces, the American and Alaskan governments, northern aboriginal communities, environmentalists and the business community on how they could develop our north. However there was not a passing reference to this kind of development in the Speech from the Throne, not even a mention of developing the north.

Instead of co-ordinating projects that would employ thousands of individuals, they tinker with the EI bill by making minor amendments. They are more concerned about keeping people on employment insurance than they are in providing them with good, long term, full time employment.

Nevertheless, because of the Liberal's lack of vision we are limited to debating a handful of amendments to the EI act. There is no vision of moving forward in a strong dynamic way by making great changes and great projects. We are talking about minor changes to an existing bill that does not address the serious problems of employment.

We will not spend a lot of time on the details of the bill at second reading. We want to move the legislation before a committee. We want to see whether the Liberal government is intent on opening up the process of reforming parliament to allow real discussion and real debate on employment insurance and what it should be doing and what it is doing. We want to see whether things can work differently and better.

We want the first bill being debated in the House of Commons to go to committee. We in the opposition will make a commitment to go there with an open mind. We hope the government will go there with an open mind as well, so that we can hear witnesses and people who specialize in this area and, if necessary, make changes to make the legislation better. I would like to see the bill serve as an indication of the willingness of the House to do things differently for the good of all Canadians.

[Employment Insurance Act, February 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, are there not any questions and comments?

[The Famous Five, October 18th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, 71 years ago today it became official that women were officially persons.

As the monument is unveiled today on Parliament Hill for the Famous Five, I am sure that Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, Nellie McClung and Irene Parlby would appreciate the irony of Ottawa as the home of this tribute.

For a dozen years the Famous Five battled Ottawa to get recognized as persons. While the Alberta government ruled that women were indeed persons, in Ottawa five successive Liberal and Conservative federal governments refused to change the law. When the Famous Five got to the supreme court in 1928 they were turned down there as well. It took a 1929 decision from the British privy council to finally declare that women were persons.

As we celebrate the Famous Five's accomplishments today, we need to remember that they achieved what they did despite the federal government, not because of it.

[Canada Health Care, Early Childhood Development And Other Social Services Funding Act, October 17th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague read out a number of bills that the government has introduced but has done nothing about.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague if he is aware of the various advertising programs that the government has gone through in the last three months, namely, a little booklet that went out to all seniors telling them about all the wonderful things the Liberal government has done. I wonder whether or not some of the tabled bills that have not been passed and have not gone through the system have been alluded to in that little booklet. I wonder also about the cost of that little booklet. I am also wondering about the cost of the $8 million ad campaign telling Canadians how wonderful the government is for solving the health care problems that it created. Are these costs also incurred through this multi-list of tabled bills that the government has put forth?

[Canada Health Care, Early Childhood Development And Other Social Services Funding Act, October 17th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I think we need to clarify something for the listening audience. When I talk about a $6 billion cut I am talking about each year. Collectively over the five years it was budgeted for, we are talking in the neighbourhood of $30 billion. That is the enormity of the actual loss in funding that the provinces have had to operate under.

I would like to talk about private clinics versus publicly administered health care services. I do not imagine that there is a province in Canada that does not have some type of private clinic. Some clinics are for eyes, some for general practice, some for laboratory work, some are abortion clinics and so on. There are a lot of private clinics out there.

Here is the concern Canadians should have. Because of the failure of our public system to handle the demand for hip surgeries, cataract operations and whatnot, Canadians who can afford it are taking to the United States the dollars that could be supporting a Canadian health care system of private clinics, public services or whatever. That money is supporting American public health care.

I have good friends in Mount Vernon, south of the border, who run a public hospital, from birth to death. They have a public system for people who cannot afford insurance. People who come into their emergency room are looked after whether they can afford it or not. My friends are overjoyed with the Canadians using their services, because Canadians are subsidizing that public service they give to their own American people.

How does that make any sense? In Canada our people are waiting 15 or 18 months for hip surgery but if someone can afford to use an American clinic, he or she can have surgery next week.

That is the concern Canadians should have. Our dollars are supporting the American health care system, not the Canadian health care system. We have to stop that. We have to make our system work by a commitment, followed up on by the federal government, to put funding in place which the provinces can count on to be there, and that funding cannot be taken away unilaterally when it serves the purpose of the federal government.

[Canada Health Care, Early Childhood Development And Other Social Services Funding Act, October 17th, 2000]

I do not ever recall saying that I thought we should have an American health care system. I do not believe that and neither does the Canadian Alliance.

What we are concerned about is that when we send Canadians to the U.S. to have their treatment because we cannot provide it here, it costs, in the case of this one individual, $60,000 to the health care system of B.C. or Canada to pay for this service in the States. That $60,000 U.S. is not helping to support our Canadian health care system. It is helping the public health care system in the United States. That is what I object to. We are using our Canadian health care dollars every time we send one of our patients south of the border.

It is happening all the time. I have newspaper clippings here. The third patient in a week went to Seattle. This was a trauma patient who was turned away from three hospitals in the lower mainland and got shipped to Seattle to get trauma care after a motorcycle accident in which the guy's spleen was split wide open. These sorts of things should be treated immediately. He was sent to Seattle.

Guess what? Our Canadian dollars are supporting that medical system in Seattle. They are not in Canada supporting our health care system and that is the responsibility of this government because it took the money out of the provinces' hands and the provinces cannot deliver the care citizens require. It is the responsibility of the government. The government took $6 billion-and-something out of the health care system, no one else. That is its responsibility. It ought to assume that responsibility instead of trying to pass it on to the provinces.